


What They Deserved

by Antipode



Series: I Was Lost Without You [7]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Bigotry & Prejudice, Biotic Shepard (Mass Effect), Custom Shepard (Mass Effect), F/F, Interracial Relationship, Lesbians in Space, Mild Smut, Paragon Shepard (Mass Effect), Sad Ending, Science Fiction, Spacer (Mass Effect), Tragic Romance, Wakes & Funerals, War Hero (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:48:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26900896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antipode/pseuds/Antipode
Summary: The crew of the Normandy attends a military funeral. Set shortly after the Collector attack over Alchera on May 29, 2183, that claimed the lives of 20 crewmembers of the SSV Normandy SR-1, including Commander Sybilla Reem Shepard. Told from six separate perspectives.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Liara T'Soni
Series: I Was Lost Without You [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1937521
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	1. Joker

_ This isn't what the Commander would have wanted _ , Joker thought, looking around at the press of immaculate dress uniforms and brass buttons and glittering medals. The crisp whites of the Alliance marine honor guard, standing alertly over an Earth Systems Alliance flag, folded over a coffin they all knew was empty. Fluttering banners of dozens of Earth nations that Shepard had never visited, from a planet she hadn’t been born on. Admirals and Vice-Admirals and Generals and politicians that hadn’t listened to her warnings when she was alive, had stifled her promotions, had trotted her out for endless photo-ops after every victory: after Elysium, after Torfan, after she was named the first human Spectre. After she’d saved the Citadel.

From his vantage point in the upper gallery, hidden away with the other ‘undesirables’ - the lower-decks crew, the aliens, the enlisted soldiers and sailors - Joker looked down on all the self-congradulatory pomp and circumstance down below with a searing frustration.  _ Was that all there was, in the end? Save the galaxy, sacrifice everything… then get used as a cheap prop for some fat cat’s promotion or re-election campaign? _ The elite of the Earth Systems Alliance cheerfully, oblivious, mingled down below. Just another social call. Just another photo-op with a dead war hero.

_ The Commander had deserved better. _


	2. Wrex

_This isn't what Shepard would have wanted_ , Wrex thought, staring at the empty box surrounded by empty suits. They scuttled around, the weak, fragile, half-senile pink things, not a quad to share between the dozens of them mingling down below. They’d stuffed him up in the gallery, out of a fear that he’d cause a scene, and he’d gone willingly, knowing that none of the soft-boned pyjak-farmers here could have stopped him if they tried. _Maybe those three could’ve given me a dance,_ he admitted after a moment, eyes locked on a pair of older, scarred man-humans - _Hacker and Ander-something?_ \- and a female that looked strikingly like his dead friend, but older.

_Shepard. Dead._

The sudden-ness and nature of Shepard’s death disquieted him. The female human was as tough as any krogan he’d ever met - tougher - and the ignomity of going down with her ship stuck in his craw. She’d deserved a grand battle, to die blood-soaked and howling her defiance to the face of her human gods, a gun in her hand and a skull in the other. A krogan’s death. A warrior’s death.

_Is this how it’ll be for me? 700 years of searching for the gun or the blade just a little faster than mine, to be felled by… what? A shuttle crash? A pyjak-bone lodged in the throat? If Shepard could be killed by an exploding ship, what inglorious end awaits the rest of us?_

He glared at the empty box.

_Shepard had deserved better._


	3. Tali

_ This isn't what Shepard would have wanted, _ Tali thought, glancing around at the darkened upper gallery while the party bustled down below. All the ‘aliens’ - and there were a surprising number of them - had been pushed out of sight, so as not to ruin what she presumed was an Alliance photo-op. There were so many humans down there, and only a few familiar faces. Tali had only known Shepard for a few short, frenetic months, but her time aboard the Normandy SR-1 had seemed a lifetime for the young quarian, and in that lifetime she could only recall seeing a handful of the human faces down below having ever had the time to speak with Shepard.

The faces in the gallery, however…

Half a dozen salarian soldiers in black-and-yellow uniforms stood near the back, chattering animatedly, each proudly bearing a small star and a silver dagger on their breast. She caught one of their eyes, and nodded when the salarian Captain, Kirrahe, proudly tapped a two-finger salute over his heart. A tall, grizzled turian Captain Tali recognized from C-Sec stood with a handful of his under-officers, still nursing their wounds from the geth attack on the Citadel. There were more than a dozen asari, half in the distinctive leather uniforms of the huntress cadres - including, to Tali’s shock - Matriarch Lidanya, the Captain of the Destiny Ascension and the de-facto Admiral of the entire Citadel Fleet.

Tali looked to her companions, likewise relegated to the gallery. A turian, an asari, a krogan. Different species, their own lives touched by the same woman, a woman who willingly and gladly worked alongside other species, who fought alongside them, ate alongside them. Trusted them. Loved them. Tali looked at the unified galactic community Shepard had tried to build all around her, and then looked sadly down at the humans - and humans only - who’d been allowed to formally mourn her.

_ Shepard had deserved better. _


	4. Garrus

_ This isn't what Shepard would have wanted, _ Garrus thought, eyes burning at the inaction in the room, the indecision. He seethed with impatience, roiled with it. His friend, his best friend, the best friend he'd ever had, had been killed, and her killers were still out there, and nobody was doing a damn thing about it.

The Reaper that they’d destroyed over the Citadel, that they’d  _ spoken to _ on Virmire, had been dismissed as a ‘geth dreadnought.’ The Prothean beacon Shepard had in her head, that T'Soni had unlocked, was a forgotten memory. They should be preparing for war with the Reapers, should be hunting for whatever had attacked them over Alchera, but instead they were patting themselves on the back, yet again using the memory of the woman that had sacrificed herself to save them all for their own selfish self-promotion.

His shoulders shook from helpless rage as he stared daggers around the room, around the bullshit and the lies and bureaucratic red tape that had first handcuffed and humiliated the woman they'd come here to allegedly celebrate, then had sent her to die in some forgotten quarter of space. Over bad intel. Over something everyone wanted forgotten, moved past. His shoulders shook with the memory of that lopsided grin, those flashing green eyes, that indomitable spirit of service and self-sacrifice. She’d done everything right: obeyed every order, taken every hill, never questioned her duty, had seen every fight through to the end. Had never paused, never hesitated to do the right thing, no matter what it cost her. A true paragon, a leader, in every sense of the word. And they were going to plaster her face on a few recruitment posters and move on like nothing had ever happened. None of them had deserved her, but for a lifetime of service to be half-remembered by these self-righteous bastards… 

_ Shepard had deserved better. _


	5. Kaidan

_This isn't what Billie would have wanted,_ Kaidan thought, glancing at the downcast faces of the former crew of the Normandy. Joker and Garrus, wrapped up in a private anger, in the posthumous injustice done to their Commander and friend. Wrex, in a silent introspection strange for the grizzled krogan. Tali, her sorrow palpable through her helmet, looking full of regrets and things left unsaid. And Liara… Kaidan couldn’t even bear to look over at the asari, at the heart-wrenching expression of sorrow and loss etched into her luminous features, at the hopelessness and helplessness haunting her tear-brimmed eyes. How do you comfort your little sister’s widow?

 _Billie would have known how._ He thought back to their sojourn to Sirona, after they had recovered Ash’s effects. How Billie had demanded to be the one to break the news to the Williams sisters, personally. How, through the weeping and the shock and the heartbreak, she’d known exactly what to say to bring tremulous smiles to their faces, to remember Ash at her best. To honor the woman that had sacrificed her life for all of theirs. Not for the first time, he wished for a tenth part of the strength of the gangly, headstrong girl he’d met a lifetime ago at BAaT, the friend who would become like a sister to him, the woman it had been his life’s pride to serve alongside. He missed her calming presence, the way she could pick you up and dust you off with a word, the way her smile made you smile back. She’d have taken one look at this scene, shaken her head, and barked an impossible-to-disobey order in a battlefield tone: “Right, form up, marines. We’re hitting the bar.” And when someone inevitably protested - more often than not Kaidan himself - she’d have flashed that familiar lopsided grin, given him an emerald wink, and asked “What’s the matter, K - you trying to live forever?”

Billie would have wanted laughter, would have wanted smiles. Would have wanted tall tales and jokes, Garrus and Joker’s incorrigible teasing and good-natured taunting, Wrex’s inappropriate jabs, Tali’s awkwardness translating into drinking too much too quickly, a flustered Liara not realizing she was the target of some gentle ribbing.

She wouldn’t have wanted this embarrassing spectacle of brass buttons and white lace, with her friends tucked out of sight away from the stuffy, over-starched parade. She wouldn’t have wanted a dress uniform in sight. She’d have wanted an upbeat fiddle and a canopy of twinkling stars, overhead. She’d have wanted her life celebrated with _more life._

_Billie had deserved better._


	6. Liara

_ This isn't what Sybilla would have wanted _ , Liara thought, angrily, as she struggled to keep the yawning black hole in her middle from swallowing her, from dragging her even deeper under the still waves of a fathomless sorrow. She felt sick, and empty, and though she’d done little but cry for a week, she felt like she could burst into fresh tears at any second, felt like she could erupt in a biotic singularity of violence and despair at any moment. Anger and sorrow and emptiness twisted through her gut like a knife. Air felt stale around her. Food turned to ash on her tongue. Every morning, there was a new, empty bottle of elasa by her bedside, and she could scarcely recall where they were coming from, where they were going. She felt like she was coming apart at the seams. In such a short time, the two people in her life she had ever gone to for comfort had been taken from her. Leaving her alone.

_ This day was always going to come, _ she reminded herself furiously, stifling the tears she knew were a foregone conclusion at this point.  _ We’d already had the ‘lifespan talk.’ We always knew our time together would be short, relatively speaking. _

_ Not this short _ , another voice sobbed.  _ Not this short. Goddess, we were supposed to have more time. We were supposed to have… _

She squeezed her eyes shut, remembering. 

Remembering how Sybilla used to come into her quarters behind the med-bay, to ‘check’ on her after missions, a cup of coffee for her and a tea for the asari; mint, or dried sage and honey, somehow always seeming to know which she’d been craving. 

Remembering the first time she’d been chosen to accompany her planetside on a mission; how in the shuttle bay she’d wordlessly and without being asked had helped the asari into her armor, a shockingly intimate gesture she’d barely understood but somehow knew to reciprocate. How it had become a tradition, how she’d not-so-secretly preened at the extra attention, how her heart had glowed with the trust offered her at being the one to help secure Commander Shepard’s field kit. 

Remembering how on their first return journey to the Citadel she’d shown up unexpectedly with crates full of asari-specific supplies that the Alliance vessel had not been equipped with, things to make her presence aboard the human vessel more comfortable; how she’d reached out to the asari consulate for the list, had taken time out of her own busy schedule to personally see to it that Liara was properly cared for.

Remembering how, while resupplying on a human colony in the Traverse, she’d let out an uncharacteristically girlish exclamation and had practically dragged her and Chief Williams into a tiny family-run cafe, apparently of the same ethnic region that her birth-father had originated from. How she, eyes sparkling with nostalgia, had proceeded to buy nearly every piece of confectionary in the store, had spoken excitedly with the stunned proprietor in a broken dialect, thanking him over and over. How she’d popped half of one of the pastries in her mouth and moaned with pleasure, nearly shoving the other half into Liara’s mouth and demanding she follow suit,  _ immediately _ . How the cardamom and cloves and honey and lemon and rosewater had wedded on her tongue, sweet and rich and slightly sticky, how the moment of bliss had swept, shuddering over her. How sharing the dessert had felt dangerously like sharing a kiss, and how she’d been overwhelmed with longing, with desire to lick the sweetness from those pert lips.

Remembering how, just before the terrifying ordeal of Ilos, the Mu Relay, and the near-suicidal attack on the Citadel, she’d had just that opportunity. How desperately they’d clung to each other in the sweet urgency of their lovemaking, clung like a drowning person grasped a spar keeping them afloat, as they clung to the tiny flicker of hope and happiness they’d kindled through so much death and despair. How tender Sybilla had been, how trusting. How deep her affection, her love had run, as their bodies and minds entwined and their breaths and their heartbeats and their very thoughts melted together.

Remembering how in the aftermath of that victory over Sovereign the feelings they had secretly shared for the duration of their mission had bloomed, unafraid, in the light of what had felt like the start of something that would last forever. How fingers entwined under a mess hall table and stolen kisses in quiet corners and the warmth of her skin and the strength of her arms wrapped around her as she drifted off, blissfully into sleep, had become a daily ritual.

Remembering of how frequently and how hopefully they’d spoken of a life together,  _ after _ . Of visiting Thessia, of visiting Earth. Of plans for a future only one of them would now see.

“It was like I was born again, the day I met you,” Sybilla had told her, those eyes fixated on her like she was the only person in the universe, a half-smile of incredulous devotion and tenderness plastered across her face. “Like my life didn’t really start until Therum. Until you, Bluebird, all I’d ever wanted was life in the Corps. But now… all I can think about is what comes next, with you.”

Angry tears streamed down Liara’s face as she reflected on the callous, unfeeling unfairness of the universe that would take Sybilla from her, that would steal from Sybilla the peace and happiess that she’d fought so hard for. The chance to build a life, a family, that she’d wanted. That she, more than anyone else, had earned.

_ Sybilla had deserved better. _


End file.
